38. The only way to bring Bush and Cheney to trial would be to have certain conditions on the ground.

Such as were imposed on Germany by the Allied occupiers. It's not a matter of covering up and making it right. We've taken a different course because the solution is the collapse of the federal government itself. That is why it's been hands off and is impracticable within any one country. Many Germans helped with bringing them to justice, but that was not a function of the government of Hitler.

It had to be vanquished, disappeared, destroyed or in other terms, made defunct. Consider that for a moment, and the many aspirations to justice that the Founders wrote about. Think of the Bill of Rights and Constitution being tossed aside in totality, rewritten by a foreign occupier and the government that so many people count on, being gone. What then would we be defending, when it's gone, what charter of human rights would replace it at that juncture, I don't know nor trust. I'm just speaking the history, not mocking the passion, but there are reasons not to do this, even though it leaves our country with a blood debt, that can only be paid by the forgiveness of those harmed, if they are willing.

There is no easy solution to such crimes in the satisfying, Biblical tone of justice meted out at Nuremberg, that have been committed by this country. That was the stuff of movie lore, quite dramatic. To hold those trials and imprison required the German people to be under the boot of the Allies.

We may talk of the boot in the face, but we have never seen it as the people of Europe did, or Asia, under the Axis powers. Nor did we live through an occupation such as Iraq suffered. The good do not always win in revolutions and wars. Spain was not freed from Franco for many years after a horrendous civil war and slaughter with the help of the Axis. That was one context in which the rebels lost and should have won.

The outcome of wars and revolutions are uncertain, and in many instances have replaced better system with dictatorships. The Weimar Republic was replaced by those who were angry and impatient for change at any cost.

We may want to think that the Allied occupation was handled in a just and humane fashion as our national media says. But in accounts I have read and with people I have discussed who lived through it over there, it was nothing like the civil order we have here, no matter how quickly reconstructed or the best intentions which did work out in the end.

The lived through a war and an aftermath we cannot imagine. They could be herded to fit the occupiers for work and their legal protections could have all been eliminated. This is just as any defeated country's people are. The only way to bring actors such as Bush, et al, to that situation would be from the outside. Most people have not considered the amount of force required to punish this cabal, or how enmeshed we are with our government, good and bad. If we look back through history, every POTUS could be convicted of crimes against humanity if we go for pure justice for all the native peoples and everyone who was slaughtered in every other cause.

The price of civil disobedience is not an easy one to bear in any part of history. As I have said before, I think Manning did what he thought was right, but I'm not so generous to those who are not in his position and made their names off of his sacrifice. He joined up and took an oath with an organization that does tolerate that.

He is the one suffering for his act of conscience. But there are those in that organization who will never feel the sympathy for him that I do, because I am not part of that organization and have not lived by their code. I still wish him the best and hope he will discharge whatever they demand of him and get to go home as soon as possible.